1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:08,000 This is hacker public radio episode, 3451, for Monday the 25th of October 2021. 2 00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:16,000 To its show is entitled, Brick Link, it is hosted by operator and is about 14 minutes long and carries a clean flag. 3 00:00:16,000 --> 00:00:20,000 The summary is, custom third part LEGO shops. 4 00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:24,000 This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honest host of com. 5 00:00:24,000 --> 00:00:32,000 Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15. 6 00:00:32,000 --> 00:00:42,000 Bit your web hosting that's honest and fair at an honest host.com. 7 00:01:02,000 --> 00:01:20,000 Hello everyone, welcome to the episode of Hackable Public Radio with your host operator. 8 00:01:20,000 --> 00:01:28,000 Today should be pretty quick, it's about Brick Link and LEGO's third party LEGO resellers. 9 00:01:28,000 --> 00:01:36,000 This was in response to a video game called Borderlands. 10 00:01:36,000 --> 00:01:40,000 This video game had a character in it called Claptrap. 11 00:01:40,000 --> 00:01:46,000 I liked, I was tracking some of their models and stuff and they had one that you could press a button. 12 00:01:46,000 --> 00:01:50,000 It would make a sound and of course it was 200 dollars for some ridiculous. 13 00:01:50,000 --> 00:02:08,000 It has since gone up in price to 300 or something ridiculous, so these collectible figurines and that type of market is not something I'm willing to spend that much money on to get something that I think is kind of a cat gift for myself. 14 00:02:08,000 --> 00:02:14,000 I've entered upon custom LEGO stuff. 15 00:02:14,000 --> 00:02:24,000 And somehow I had come across someone making a custom something from a custom LEGO something from a video game. 16 00:02:24,000 --> 00:02:28,000 And I thought, you know what I wonder if anybody's made a custom Claptrap. 17 00:02:28,000 --> 00:02:38,000 And it turns out there was and I did find a source for the directions or the diagrams or whatever they call it. 18 00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:44,000 And they have different pieces of software you can build your own manuals for LEGO type of stuff. 19 00:02:44,000 --> 00:02:52,000 And then traditionally at the end if you're lucky they'll put the parts list at the bottom and tell you exactly what parts you need and how many you need of them. 20 00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:54,000 And you can kind of build it out of your own. 21 00:02:54,000 --> 00:03:00,000 Now the problem with that is obviously you don't have no one has all of those parts. 22 00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:10,000 And the even more interesting is that some of these parts are rare and very expensive and prohibitive to order online. 23 00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:20,000 So if you know what you're doing you can generally probably swap parts out and make it work from a design engineering perspective. 24 00:03:20,000 --> 00:03:24,000 I was just kind of going through the whole motions as a first timer. 25 00:03:24,000 --> 00:03:30,000 And the site that I used was called BrickLink. I stumbled upon a few of them. 26 00:03:30,000 --> 00:03:36,000 See if I can name some of the ones I didn't decide on for whatever reason. 27 00:03:36,000 --> 00:03:44,000 BrickLink, Brick Owl, Rebrickable, Toy Pro, and PebbleLego.com. 28 00:03:44,000 --> 00:03:48,000 And I looked through all of these in various forms and I might not have been doing it right. 29 00:03:48,000 --> 00:03:56,000 But I wasn't happy with the checkout process or the inventory process or any of that stuff. 30 00:03:56,000 --> 00:03:58,000 And I ended up using BrickLink. 31 00:03:58,000 --> 00:04:06,000 Now, like again, that might be because I'm not familiar with the site enough to do the right things and order the right stuff. 32 00:04:06,000 --> 00:04:10,000 It might be just something that I messed up on. 33 00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:15,000 But generally speaking at first glance, those other websites were not the right fit for me. 34 00:04:15,000 --> 00:04:23,000 There's also predefined sets on there that are custom sets that you can just straight up kind of buy. 35 00:04:23,000 --> 00:04:29,000 So if you're looking at a parrot, which looks pretty dang cool that someone created. 36 00:04:29,000 --> 00:04:34,000 And, you know, well, it's like this is an actual Lego.com thing. 37 00:04:34,000 --> 00:04:37,000 But there's other various diagrams or whatever. 38 00:04:37,000 --> 00:04:41,000 And you can pay for them, I guess, people sell them, you know, that type of thing. 39 00:04:41,000 --> 00:04:45,000 But anyways, the whole idea is to kind of build your own. 40 00:04:45,000 --> 00:04:49,000 Now, the first step is to get it into some image. 41 00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:54,000 Now, you can do this manually, which is not recommended at all. 42 00:04:54,000 --> 00:04:55,000 But I had to do it. 43 00:04:55,000 --> 00:04:59,000 What you want is a parts list and some kind of data form database form. 44 00:04:59,000 --> 00:05:06,000 What I had to do is look at the PDF and take each part and do account and do an Excel table. 45 00:05:06,000 --> 00:05:12,000 Then that Excel table eventually got converted into, I don't remember how I got there. 46 00:05:12,000 --> 00:05:18,000 I might have manually done it into a database type that these guys will let you import from. 47 00:05:18,000 --> 00:05:28,000 So most of them will let you import a XML file or whatever, JSON of a list of different, of the different pieces you need. 48 00:05:28,000 --> 00:05:37,000 So long as sort of it is, I spent a long time getting the part numbers right, getting the parts right, I'm getting the amount of the parts right. 49 00:05:37,000 --> 00:05:41,000 And there's some parts that don't really exist anymore and you have to swap them out. 50 00:05:41,000 --> 00:05:43,000 And there was one particular rod. 51 00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:50,000 It was like two these little brown, very short, you know, three Lego bricks long, brown rod. 52 00:05:50,000 --> 00:05:55,000 I spent like $5 on a piece or something stupid because I was not paying attention to the order form. 53 00:05:55,000 --> 00:06:08,000 And then this whole build, I want to say, I don't, doesn't say how many pieces it is, but I want to say it's from Lego, it would probably be a $30, it'd probably be like a $50 set on Lego and I spent $150. 54 00:06:08,000 --> 00:06:23,000 Now that's only because I was kind of in a rush and I wanted a one stop place for all my parts and I didn't want to wait around and I was kind of tired of the whole process because it was very daunting and just getting the parts and getting the right sellers. 55 00:06:23,000 --> 00:06:34,000 So you could have probably gotten away with maybe $100, $120, something like that, but it's definitely, I think more expensive to completely build from a Lego thing. 56 00:06:34,000 --> 00:06:47,000 What I think happens is most people have your normal pieces, most people have pieces to swap out and say, oh well, you know, I don't have six of these, but I do have six of this other color or some other, some other thing. 57 00:06:47,000 --> 00:06:55,000 But I would assume a lot of people that are really into this have enough Lego to like save themselves a fair amount of money. 58 00:06:55,000 --> 00:07:11,000 So anyways, what I'll say is some of this general caveats is, you know, beware of the shipping prices, you'll get, you know, really cheap Lego, but it's from like, you know, a different country. 59 00:07:11,000 --> 00:07:19,000 And they're going to charge you an arm a leg for shipping. So you buy three parts from them and it's not even worth the shipping to ship it to ship it to you. 60 00:07:19,000 --> 00:07:33,000 I haven't here always used instant checkout, which apparently, I think they do it kind of, if I had to guess it was a batch-based order by default. So for example, if I order six of one thing, I won't get that right away. 61 00:07:33,000 --> 00:07:45,000 They won't pack it up right away. They'll wait till they get a batch of, you know, 50 years something and then maybe they'll do a mini batch. I don't know what the instant checkout is, but I think maybe it's a feature of like, 62 00:07:45,000 --> 00:07:55,000 maybe ratings based, maybe the seller doesn't have enough ratings or confidence that they can't do instant checkout or something because there's a lot of back and forth. 63 00:07:55,000 --> 00:08:09,000 I had received two different parts that were incorrect and I had to, I think he just dropped ship them to me. So I ended up getting, you know, ten parts for free or something because he sent like two, three parts that were completely wrong. 64 00:08:09,000 --> 00:08:19,000 Be sure to check the USA box. This is specific to BrickLink website. So there is an option in there that says, you know, only ship to USA or USA only or something. 65 00:08:19,000 --> 00:08:29,000 That way you're not having to wait for customs and wait a month. Wait a month to get your item. For me, it was two to three times the cost of Lego.com set. 66 00:08:29,000 --> 00:08:45,000 So what generally people would like to do is say, okay, these three sets will give you this item. These three sets will give you these, so obviously it's going to be insanely expensive to buy three sets as opposed to building it for BrickLink. 67 00:08:45,000 --> 00:08:57,000 If you happen to have those sets, I guess, I don't know what the parody is there, but often you'll see sometimes it'll say, you know, these three sets make up this, this particular build. 68 00:08:57,000 --> 00:09:10,000 Playing on paying, you know, three to five people via PayPal during the checkout process. And this is excruciating if you don't have it, a lot of filler for PayPal and your auto fill and auto log in stuff and auto. 69 00:09:10,000 --> 00:09:24,000 You're like last pass or password manager. No way to easy share a wanted list. So I can you can build a wanted list through kind of XML and say, you know, this is my build for the clap trap, right. 70 00:09:24,000 --> 00:09:35,000 But there's no easy way to to share it on their website as far as I can tell. They might have changed that. I don't know, but I ended up putting, it's probably not even in here anymore because my website is, does then yeah. 71 00:09:35,000 --> 00:09:51,000 So these, I got the borderlands PDF, but I don't see the XML file is missing actually. So I still had the PDF of the clap trap, but I do not have the XML, which is not good. 72 00:09:51,000 --> 00:10:02,000 That's the meat of it. That was the hardest part was building the XML file and making sure all the parts were the right parts and the parts that were swapped out were swapped out or whatever. 73 00:10:02,000 --> 00:10:17,000 Let's see, I had seven missing out of 216 in one shipping and one shipment. So, you know, the idea that you want to work one person, that's not going to happen. Like I said, it's going to be 35 people. 74 00:10:17,000 --> 00:10:31,000 You know, people that use their size are people like me that are going to do a one off thing and then realize that they went over their budget because, you know, for another hundred bucks I could have gotten the 75 00:10:31,000 --> 00:10:46,000 whatever clap trap. I did end up ordering another little mini clap trap. I'll take a picture and put it in a show notes along with the links to the stuff. Let me add that note in here before I forget sorry. 76 00:10:46,000 --> 00:10:50,000 Pick up clap trap. 77 00:10:50,000 --> 00:10:56,000 But yeah, if you know, let's go a bit. You got disposable income. You know, it's been stupid amounts of money on done. 78 00:10:56,000 --> 00:11:10,000 Other than that, you know, it was very, it was very tedious man. I mean, this is not even that big of a build. This is a tiny little build comparatively to, you know, some of the builds you see obviously online. 79 00:11:10,000 --> 00:11:29,000 I want to say it's not even maybe six feet tall, six foot tall clap trap, not foot six inches tall clap trap, you know, and it's a lot of parts and it was very pretty excruciating to go through the parts list and get the right parts and get the orders right and get it all out. 80 00:11:29,000 --> 00:11:54,000 Best bet is to find a friend, which I should have used my friend who's a Lego maniac. I should have gone to his house, you know, picked out the parts that I needed that he might have had. He probably could have saved me 50 bucks. I guarantee you do could have saved me 50 bucks. I could get him 20 bucks to take the parts and he would have been 20 bucks for sure. And I would have been, you know, not in the whole $50 or so. 81 00:11:54,000 --> 00:12:19,000 So that's your best bet. The other piece of advice I would say is, you know, if you want to do it, it's not as easy as it looks. I mean, even if this is a PDF with one, two, three, four or three and a half pages of parts and it still took way too long to build the parts out and get it all matching in order of the parts. 82 00:12:19,000 --> 00:12:28,000 And what I probably spent four hours getting all the parts right and ordering the parts and getting it before I actually started building it. 83 00:12:28,000 --> 00:12:40,000 I spent more time paying for the Lego and getting the bits right and then actually building it. I think it took very short time to build. 84 00:12:40,000 --> 00:12:49,000 So in that regard, you know, it's be careful about what you do, what you order. And again, I'll save Lego. 85 00:12:49,000 --> 00:12:55,000 Lego sites I was looking at. Brooklyn was the one I chose with brick owls when I tried. 86 00:12:55,000 --> 00:13:09,000 I heard some good things about toy pro I looked at and pebble Lego I looked at. But I think repricable was another one that I was going to try to use or either toy pro. I will between those two, one of those I was going to use. 87 00:13:09,000 --> 00:13:19,000 And I ended up fearing brick link out and realizing that they had like an upload function where you could just kind of fulfill your cart with different sellers. 88 00:13:19,000 --> 00:13:27,000 And that's kind of how it is. It's like an eBay but for Lego and it's just it's just the hot mess because you have 15 different vendors for the same part. 89 00:13:27,000 --> 00:13:34,000 And like one vendor will give you three of the pieces and it's like okay well that's three pieces, but then I have to pay $15 shipping. 90 00:13:34,000 --> 00:13:40,000 So again, it's beware of those shipping costs beware of the unique item cost. 91 00:13:40,000 --> 00:13:46,000 So for example, you might get 216 pieces from one vendor. Great. That's awesome. Why is it so expensive? 92 00:13:46,000 --> 00:13:54,000 If you're not paying attention, you look down on the item list and say oh I paid $5 a piece for two items. 93 00:13:54,000 --> 00:13:58,000 And that's just insane. See if I can see my orders placed here. 94 00:13:58,000 --> 00:14:02,000 Day, now these are old. 95 00:14:02,000 --> 00:14:10,000 Anyways, that's pretty much it. Hope it helps you out. I'll provide the PDF of the clap trap. It's beautiful. I love it. 96 00:14:10,000 --> 00:14:18,000 What I say. It's worth it. $150. No. It's not worth it. But it's pretty badass. And I did buy a mini. 97 00:14:18,000 --> 00:14:27,000 A little mini clap trap and I had someone make me. It's kind of like this clay, a malleable clay, kind of like sucrose, sucrose or whatever stuff is. 98 00:14:27,000 --> 00:14:37,000 But it's a malleable clay that you can mold into a little small things and that's seen somebody make a friend of a friend to make a baby Yoda. 99 00:14:37,000 --> 00:14:44,000 And so that's really cool. I can take a picture of a clap trap and just tell him to name his price because I've spent $150 on Lego thing. 100 00:14:44,000 --> 00:14:51,000 I mean, what's another 50 bucks for a custom whatever. And I ended up he ended up it's like donating to a school or something guys in high school or something. 101 00:14:51,000 --> 00:14:58,000 So I ended up giving him to the 20 bucks or something for for a custom little clay clap trap. 102 00:14:58,000 --> 00:15:05,000 So I've got three clap traps instead of the one that I really kind of wanted that made noises and stuff. 103 00:15:05,000 --> 00:15:13,000 So I hope you guys will help you out in, you know, find a friend and use one of these brick links and have fun. 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